


A Justice

by Greekhoop



Category: As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Genre: Gen, Humor, Yuletide 2012, Yuletide Treat, comeuppance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 07:19:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greekhoop/pseuds/Greekhoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some things is going to change around here...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Justice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [singsongsung](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/gifts).



> Thanks for requesting this fandom. I'm so glad you did! I wanted to write something in the vein of the kind of Southern folk humor that inspires so much of the book. I hope you enjoy!

When I was first laid up with the cast on my leg, it was right nice. I got to do all that thinking I hadn’t had the time to get around to before. There wasn’t much of anything to do but lay there and think and watch the sunlight make its way across the room. I felt like I’d been somehow transported back to a time when I was just a baby. It was like a last little slice of babyhood when you least expected it.

Then the day came when I realized I’d gotten through all the thoughts that had been troubling me and I didn’t have no more to keep me occupied. It felt like I’d worked through a great backorder of jobs and now that I was finished I could only sit there, my hands grasping for more to do, and wait for something else.

I got bored then. And I reckon that’s when I started thinking thoughts I oughtnt’ve.

Jewel’s been acting like the hog that got into the corn crib since Darl’s been gone. He comes in at night whenever he feels like it - if he comes in at all. When he is here, he struts around like he fair well owns the place. There’s finally nothing left for him to be afraid of.

At some point while I’m laid up, he must’ve come across a little bit of work somewhere. One night he comes home late, and I can hear him fumbling around in the darkness, setting up his little pallet and suchlike in the corner. He never bothers to take off his boots while he does this. It would be a kindness, to let honest people get a little sleep when they can manage it, and if not honest people, then at least his own family. 

But with Jewel, he always has to be sure that you know where things stand. He playacts stealth just enough that can’t no one accuse him of anything, but every word of what he really wants to say to us is all wrapped up in the crunch, crunch of his soles on the sawdust floor.

Tonight the crunch, crunch has become tap, tap. Like a man with a cane striking it to keep time. It takes him longer than usual to get settled, and more than once, it seems like, he forgets something on the other side of the room and has to go back to fetch it, tap, tap the whole way.

Once he finally gets settled in, I say, “Reckon you paid a couple of pretty pennies for them.”

“Reckon you ought to mind your business,” he says. Not but five minutes later I know from his breathing that he’s sound asleep, but I ain’t got nothing to do but lie awake and think over a few things that just occurred to me.

In the morning, the sun comes through the oilcloth curtains and falls, just like the hand of God Hisself, on that new pair of boots. They have a black oily sheen to them, and red stitching all up the sides. The heels are stacked, and the toes come to a point like the blade of a kitchen knife. I suppose there ain’t no accounting for taste in this world.

When he wakes up, the first thing he does is pull those damn boots on and shove the legs of his denims down inside them like as if no one has anything better to do then look at all that red stitching all day.

I can hear him go off down the little hallway that divides the sleeping rooms from the kitchen. I can hear him pacing around while he eats a piece of bread smeared with lard and gulps down a cup of hot chicory coffee. I can hear him out on the porch, walking up and down a few times, just so I ain’t like to miss it. Even when I doze off a little towards the middle of the day, I can like to hear his monotonous stiff-backed rhythm going back and forth in my dreams.

When I wake up, I feel dizzy from it. And it’s not like I thought it up myself because the thought is already sitting there full-formed in my head: Some things is going to change around here.

One thing about being laid up in bed, it makes you patient. Dewey Dell has made me a sturdy little switch of braided straw, and I can fit it under the edge of my cast to scratch where the bone and suchlike is healing. I can sit there scratching and waiting for hours, though I don’t mean that as a boast.

It’s on about three days later when I hear the tap, tap, tap of his boots coming back towards the room where I am. He sits right down on the edge of the bed without even so much as a look in my direction and he pulls off one of his boots and takes out a filthy handkerchief and spits on it and starts to clean all around them swooping red stitches.

“I reckon you’re getting good use out of them while you can.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he says.

“Next times we needs some money, he’s just going to find a way to get those off of you. He’ll sell them for not even a bit of what they’re worth, doesn’t matter how well you keep the shine up.”

“He’s welcome to try. I’ll knock him down.”

“How come you never knocked him down before, then? All them other times he took things from you?”

“I’ve been fixing to for a long time.”

He spits again. Now he’s scrubbing around the heel of the boot, all caked with mud and dust. I let him keep it up for a while. Him scouring and scrubbing all over the heel of his boot, while I scratch under my cast when the skin is starting to grow back.

“It’s a right shame,” I says. “Just as soon as the doctor comes out to get this here cast off, those fine boots of yours are just going to disappear.”

“I bought these boots with my own earned money. You got that cast from your own fool stupidity. You’re a grown man and I ain’t about to be paying for your doctor.”

“Doubtful that pa is going to see it that way.”

“I don’t care whether he sees it cockeyed and starring Valentino. He ain’t going to get none of this. Was the two of you that got that cast on you, and the two of you can get it off.”

“It’s funny you should mention that, in fact…”

He glances back at me but he doesn’t say anything right off. Very carefully, he slides his now clean boot on and pulls off the dirty one and sets to giving it the same frantic polish.

“You just tell me what you’re thinking,” he says. “Don’t go acting all cagey about it like as if you don’t know how to break it to me that you’re in a family way or somesuch.”

“I was just thinking, that I reckon I could get this cast off without no help from no doctor. I’d just need the right tools.”

“Like what?”

“Like that fancy fine-tooth saw I seen in the catalog. And of course I couldn’t make a cut without a level to plan it out. And one of them hammers with the claw on the other end. I reckon that would about do in a pinch.”

“Just where are you planning on getting the money for all them tools?”

“I thought you might help me out,” I says. “Brother to brother.”

“No.”

“You’d have to get the money somehow, but just think. Them fancy boots ain’t going to be safe from pa anywhere except maybe in the pawn shop.”

“No, I said.”

“It’d just be temporary. Until I could pay you back. Wouldn’t no one buy them boots that they know is yours, Jewel. Everyone is much too scared of you.”

“Goddamn you, no.”

He pulls his boot back on and stuffs the filthy bandana into his pocket and goes off with a receding sound of tap, tap, tap. After that, there ain’t much for me to do but wait. For Jewel, I reckon it must seem like an awful long time goes by, but for me it ain’t nothing at all. I’ve got a lot to think about now, what with all them fine new tools I’ve got coming.

Jewel comes slinking back in right soon enough. His boots don’t make the tap, tap noise anymore. Nosir, it’s back to crunch, crunch for Jewel. He’s brought in the last of the apple brandy to celebrate our deal. The apple brandy being what the fellas up at Frenchmen Bend call their regular moonshine with a few crab apple stems floating in it.

We have ourselves a good celebration for how we showed pa, and for a little while I don’t even have to think about nothing at all.

My new tools come piecemeal over the next few weeks. With each new delivery, I feel a little stab of guilt, but that goes away once I get the package open. It is always a wonder, the things they come up with.

When the time comes to get the cast off, we ain’t got nothing to pay the doctor with. Peabody comes out anyway, full knowing it ahead of time, and does the cutting on credit, just like he and I both knew that he would. The leg don’t look half bad, though it don’t look half-good neither. I can walk around on it alright, and it only pains me much when it’s cold, when it’s hot, and when it’s raining. I reckon this is one case where something don’t got to be pretty to work.

Jewel never says nothing about the boots. Maybe he’s too embarrassed, or maybe he just doesn’t want to admit that he had so much apple brandy that night that he might have fed them boots to the hogs for all he knows. But for a long time after, there’s something dejected and beat in the way his boots come in crunch, crunch in the lean hours after dark.

As for them boots, I did chance to hear from a fella where they ended up. Some slick town character saw them in hawk right before All Hallows, and he bought them right up for his fancy dress party. They say he won first place, for his backwards country boy costume.

That gave me a lot to think over, too.


End file.
